Ex Mayor prosecuted for possession of child pornography

The Hebden Bridge Times reports that a former mayor has been released after admitting possession of one thousand images of children being abused. Police raided his home and confiscated images on his computer, after he was discovered viewing a child abuse site. He had also posted pictures of a 12 year old girl that he had stolen from the BEBO social networking site. The former mayor was given a suspended sentence and put on the sex offenders register.

Cases of paedophiles being caught in possession of child abuse images are now very frequent in the news. It appears that they are being caught very easily simply by accessing child abuse websites, from which they are then traced. Their homes are then raided and the offending images stored on their computers are then used to prosecute them.

There has been legislation in place to deal with this issue long before the advent of the internet. Section 1 of the Protection of Children Act 1978 deals with possession of child pornography. The later Sexual Offences Act 2003 deals with the facilitation or arrangement of child pornography.

The case also demonstrates the practice common amongst paedophiles of “swapping” images. The ex mayor actually admitted distributing 10 indecent images of young people under the user name “Teenracer” on an internet forum called “Skooldays”. Paedophiles do make use of children’s websites, where the content is perfectly legal, to get access to images of children or in some cases groom children. The false impression of anonymity on the internet may also lead them to believe that no-one will be watching what they do, and indeed they may be encouraged by material sent to them by other paedophiles. Another factor may be the very strong urges that drive them to abuse children or view images of abuse, which means that they are quite unable to stop.

See Hebden Bridge Times 28 August 2009 Child porn charges – ex-Mayor disgraced